The ladle is normally used for scooping out food, such as solid food, liquid diet with solid, soup or the like. For example, the function of the traditional ladle is singular, while lacking of other functions, such as screening, filtering, removing floating oil, funneling, straining, isolating, separating yolk from egg white, rapidly isolating the liquid and solids portion of the soup or the like. Therefore, the singular function of the traditional ladle is not able to meet the user's requirements.
In order to meet such requirements, U.S. Pat. No. 4,825,551 discloses a strainer ladle, which is a combination ladle strainer, wherein the strainer and ladle portions are separable and each portion is independently functionable as a ladle and a strainer, respectively. So such a strainer ladle only allows for liquid-solid separation of liquid-solid food mixtures.
CN2149165 and CN2163605 also disclose a combination of the ladle and the strainer, each of which is only used for liquid-solid separation.
CN87209706 discloses a five-purpose soup ladle, in which a single straining hole is provided on the bottom of the large ladle portion thereof while the hole may be blocked by a small ladle portion thereof, thereby stopping straining. The disadvantage of it is that it is difficult to fully pick up and remove the floating oil of the soup or in the meantime, a lot of delicious soup has also been picked up and removed.